Andy Jassy’s Keynote on Day 1 of AWS re:Invent was all about enterprises and new service announcements for large Enterprise customers. Day 2 keynote and announcements by Dr. Werner Vogels on the other hand were early holiday gifts for developers.
Some of the announcements were long awaited and some of them were unexpected, but pretty cool none the less.
1. PostgreSQL on RDS: This announcement was probably one of the most anticipated one and was met with a large cheer from the audience when Dr. Vogels announced it. This is a full-featured release, with support for Multi-AZ deployments, Provisioned IOPS, the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), automated backups, and point-in-time recovery. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is available now in all AWS Regions and you can start using it today!
2. New Instance types, I2 & C3: There were two new additions to an already large family of EC2 instance types. For compute-intensive workloads on EC2, Dr. Vogels introduced C3 family of instances. The SSD-backed instance type offers double the memory per virtual CPU than the C1 instance, making it ideal for tasks involving batch data processing, analytics, high-performance scientific computing, 3D rendering, engineering, and simulation. According to a blog post by AWS when compared to EC2’s general purpose instance types, the instances in this family have a higher ratio of compute power to memory.
Another new instance type announced, to be made available soon was the I2 instance family. The I2 instances are optimized for high performance random I/O. They are a great fit for transactional systems and NoSQL databases.
3. Amazon Kinesis: This was the block buster announcement of the day. Amazon Kinesis is a managed service designed to handle real-time streaming of big data. It can accept any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up and down as needed. Kinesis can be used in any situation that calls for large-scale, real-time data ingestion and processing. Logs for servers and other IT infrastructure, social media or market data feeds, web clickstream data, and the like. You can read more about Kinesis on the AWS official blog.
There were a few service upgrade announcements as well, automated cross-region snapshot copy for Amazon Redshift and Global Secondary Indexes for DynamoDB.
All in all it was a great day with some exciting announcements and new upgrades. Keep yourself updated by following our blog, we will be posting our experiences with some of these services soon.